


Stitching Up the Circuitboards

by zuzeca



Series: The Pillars of the Temple [2]
Category: Transformers - All Media Types, Transformers: Prime
Genre: Angst, M/M, Mildly Dubious Consent, Spark Sex, Sticky Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-27
Updated: 2013-03-27
Packaged: 2017-12-06 16:53:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,678
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/737953
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zuzeca/pseuds/zuzeca
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The truth is: Megatron doesn’t have any idea of what to tell Orion. But then again, Orion may not want to hear it anyway. Sometimes the forgetfulness of cursed sleep is far more appealing than it should be. Optimus/Megatron, post S1 finale.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Stitching Up the Circuitboards

**Author's Note:**

> I seem to be incapable of writing anything for these two other than complete genfic or angsty porn. This beast is of the latter incarnation and turned out as a pseudo-sequel to my previous porny angst-fest [Between His Last Night Dream](http://archiveofourown.org/works/535000), though it's not strictly necessary to read it first. Originally posted on LJ.
> 
> Disclaimer: All recognizable characters are property of their respective copyright holders. I am making no profit from this work of fiction.

Orion was uneasy.

He could see it every movement, the way his plating hugged his protoform, an unconscious protective response, the tight line of his mouth, no longer hidden behind the blank wall of his battlemask, the rapid whirl and shutter of his optics as he took in the lines of Decepticon warriors, read their tension and suspicion.

He needed to get Orion away from them, somewhere private where he could control the flow of information. The other mech still trusted him, the shock of the Matrix had obviously jolted him back far enough in their association for that, but even at his youngest and most innocent, Orion had never been a fool.

“Come,” he nodded to Orion and clapped a hand on his shoulder. “You must be weary after the battle. I will accompany you to your quarters.”

As he herded Orion away from the main bridge, he opened a private channel and sent an informational packet to Soundwave, containing the current state of affairs and the need to convey certain information to the crew at large.

For a time at least, he was going to be Megatronus.

A ping of acknowledgement and obedience returned to him, along with a brief data packet with the details of the attempted mutiny that had occurred in his absence and Airachnid’s presence in the brig.

It was a little known fact that Soundwave was perfectly capable of spoken speech. Indeed he was likely fluent in far more dialects than Megatron himself, despite his extensive travels. Rather he chose to limit himself to soundless communication, elegant, exact packets of data, no line of code wasted, layered with meaning, with emotional tones where they were warranted. Far more precise, he’d told Megatron once, than words. Words could be silenced, twisted, misconstrued.

As his own had been by the council.

“Megatronus?”

He glanced at his companion. Orion peered at him, brought to a halt by the grip on his shoulder guard, turned crushing in his rage. Reaching up a wary hand, he settled it over Megatron’s own. “Are you alright?”

He released his enemy _friend, my friend, my brother once more_ and stepped back, drawing his hand out of reach. “My apologies.”

He didn’t offer an explanation and Orion didn’t ask for one. The other mech stared at him, sharp blue optics scanning his face, before he softened slightly. “Come,” he said, extending a hand to Megatron. “My processor may be somewhat scrambled, but I can guess that it has been a trying day. Let us retire to our quarters.”

The words caught in his spark. _Our quarters_ , as though Optimus _Orion_ had merely stepped out for a moment. As though when he drew him near he would detect the rich chemical aroma of Iaconian streets, would brush dry metal dust from his plating instead of the sticky, brown sediment of this planet.

Numb, he allowed the mech to take his hand and draw him through the door.

 

The cabin was unlit, as was much of the ship. No sense to waste energon better used for weapons or in keeping them airborne. He could hear the click of Orion’s optics as they adjusted and blinked up at him through the gloom.

They were no longer of a height, he realized. Optimus’s model had never possessed the bulk of his own but now, as Orion, he had to lean back to look Megatron in the eye. His frame, though it retained the familiar shapes of his vehicle mode and armaments, seemed reduced, smaller and more fragile than the weapon the Matrix had made of him.

It was…disconcerting.

He’d expected questions, sharp probing inquiries. He’d offered Orion no real explanation after all. But Orion merely gestured to the berth in invitation. He sat, bringing them even. The other mech observed him silently.

“You’ve changed them.”

He started at the odd not-question, “What—?”

“Your optics. They’re not blue anymore.”

His hand rose to his face, an automatic response, groping for an answer to the unexpected question, “I only—” 

A hand atop his own silenced him.

Orion smiled. “I didn’t say I didn’t like them. They suit you. I guess…it’s just, I guess you were right. Time _has_ passed. I only wish I could remember it.”

He sounded wistful.

What to say? How to tell his once-lover that his beloved planet was no more?

“You must have questions,” he began, but halted, letting the statement dangle. Better to let Orion make the first move than volunteer information himself, to see what Orion believed to have happened.

A strange, unreadable look passed over Orion’s face. “You would not be wrong.”

He tugged on Megatron’s hand and he gave it over without a thought. Strange how this one thing had never changed, through all the permutations of their association; mentor, friend, lover, enemy.

When he reached for Optimus, Optimus would always reach back.

Orion raised his hand to his face, observing the scrapes and dents across the knuckles and joints with a kind of sad acknowledgment. “But none that will not keep for a cycle or so.”

He turned Megatron’s hand over and pressed his face into the curve of the palm.

His ventilation stalled, spark energy spiking in a way that should have humiliated him at the quiet gesture. “Orion—”

“Hush,” Orion guided him to the span of his waist, curving his claws to fit, locking and holding. Like the elegant grip of a weapon, made for his hands.

_Claws hooked around that narrow waist as they coupled, the broad expanse of Optimus’s back, trust inherent even in this, especially in this, one optic dark where it had been ripped from his head, energon dripping and smearing between their bodies in wide glowing swathes…_

His claws bit into Orion’s shoulder guard, ripping long weals in the paint as arousal roared through him, sudden and shocking. He wrenched him forward, onto the berth but Orion caught and held himself, steady limbs bearing up their combined weight as he rolled and pressed them back to belly. 

“Open.”

He could barely recognize his own voice.

Orion shuddered but complied with a sharp snick, rising above the roar of their ventilation, like the sound of Optimus’s blades engaging, exactly that sound and he was pushing forward into that snug, familiar space, tight and not quite slick enough, dragging and catching, but slick already, even in the aftermath of battle, that astonishing immediacy with which Optimus _Orion_ had always wanted him. And not the loose, pleasurable slide of courtesans or even the impossible squeeze of Starscream on the rare occasion that they indulged. A perfect fit.

_Even in this, always my equal, never thought I’d find one. Why could you not see, Optimus?_

_What made you turn from me?_

Only then did he notice that Orion had gone rigid beneath him.

“Is something wrong?”

Orion shifted, valve clamping and contracting about him and he bit back a groan. “Not wrong, exactly. Only…”

“What?”

“Have we quarreled? You feel a bit…more than I can recently remember.”

Absurd, bitter amusement warred with a curl of possessive lust at the thought that Optimus had been refraining from engaging with his troops. Even if it might have been for some ludicrous self-imposed policy of austerity. “Flattery now, Orion?”

Orion snorted, “Of course you would see it as that.” But his body had relaxed beneath him and the movements of his valve had stilled. Mindful of his own mass, he gripped Orion, a stabilizing hand beneath his chassis, and tipped them upright, shifting back onto his knees. Orion’s ventilation hitched and his head lolled back, clanking against Megatron’s shoulder guard as gravity pressed him deeper.

“Good?”

An incendiary glance and the flash of a smile, soft and secret. “With you? Always.”

His sparkbeat stuttered and he switched his grip, thrusting up into Orion to avoid answering.

Orion moaned, a low, resonant sound as they rocked together. He couldn’t move well from this angle, but he seemed content to allow Megatron the reins, trusting him not to damage him, to take care.

As much care as Optimus had shown him once, all unknowing, secreted away in a body too small and too blunted to fit the angles and edges of him. A body not his own.

Something sharp and painful tightened around his spark at the thought and he stroked the seam of Orion’s chest, an instinctive, unthinking gesture.

Until the seam of the chassis divided beneath his fingers and light flooded the room.

He froze, shock momentarily grinding his movements to a halt. It shouldn’t have been unexpected; they’d indulged in sparkplay from time to time. But not for eons; there was no place for this in their brief, furious couplings, born of degraded battles, back before Cybertron went dark and the last of its once great cities fell.

Back before Optimus had given up on him.

“Megatronus,” Orion whispered, a plea.

His claws trembled and he clenched his hand to stop the shaking. Reached into the cavern of Orion’s chest, and touched.

It was so _warm_. He’d forgotten the feel of a living spark beneath his fingers, the way it pulsed and swirled, expanded with joy and pleasure rather than tight and contracted in anticipation of its own destruction. An electric tingle raced across his palm and Orion gasped, squirming.

Careful, he curled his fingers around the amorphous shape of it, blotting out the glow.

Was this how he was meant to do it? After all these eons, to press his palm to the fragile sphere and snuff the light that was Optimus Prime? Was it really so simple, so easy?

Just the tiniest bit of pressure around the corona…

Orion went rigid in his grasp. A short, sharp cry escaped him and his valve clamped tight as he spilled into overload. Contractions wracked him and he gripped at the places where their bodies touched.

“Megatron—” he tried to gasp and Megatron pressed again, cutting him off, drawing it out, not wanting to hear his old name. 

_Millennia erased for this, and all I wish is for you to speak my name. My true name._

Orion went limp in his arms, sagging back as his optics flickered and darkened. Megatron withdrew his hand, allowing the plates of Orion’s chest to close and idly stroked the complex expanse, fingers dipping between exoskeletal armor as he listened to the clink of cooling metal.

The click and hum of a system reboot. Orion shifted, stretching against him with a happy sigh, and paused.

“You didn’t…”

A brief, deliberate contraction around him brought the distant pressure of his own desire to the forefront. He shuddered, hips bucking in instinctive response that unsettled him even as sensation threatened to overwhelm him.

They both held utterly still.

And then Orion lifted himself bodily off, left him slick and bereft and aching. He reached out, an aborted, longing gesture, representative of a word which he had never said, would never say.

_Stay._

But Orion was already turning, hands pressing his legs apart and kneeling between them, all grace. Kneeling as Optimus had never done.

The metal of the berth shrieked beneath his claws as he fought the tide of overload.

Then Orion pressed his palms flat to the curve of Megatron’s chest in silent urging and he froze, spark pulsing in equal parts want and something which felt far too close to fear for his liking.

As though he’d caught the thought, Orion lifted his head and met his gaze.

“No merge today, Megatronus,” he said, and a flare of rage pulsed that he might be so transparent. “I know you’re not fond of them. Just, let me?”

He stared down at his friend _enemy, beloved enemy, my enemy, mine, my own_ and Orion held the look steadily. No pleading, no persuasion, no pity, merely waiting for Megatron to make a decision.

A grind and squeal of metal and his chest opened.

Reverent, Orion reached forward and stroked the side of his spark, just the barest bit, fingers playing with the ephemeral corona. His cooling fans stalled out and systems went haywire as his processor tried to decipher the sensation as pain or pleasure, as too much or not enough. Convulsive, he gripped at Orion’s helm, cradled him close. Then a pressure of warm ventilation against his spark and a murmur against the fissure of his chest, resonating against his internals: 

“Easy, my brother. Be easy.”

Easy, the way things were supposed to be, had always been, had never been between them. Easy, the word that Optimus had spoken to him on that half-dreaming night.

Overload seized him, violent and sudden, wrung through spark and spike and body. Static threatened at the corners of his vision and his body drew tight around Orion’s, as though trying to merge them into one being.

Megatron had always made his own destiny, but now at this moment, as Orion _Optimus_ looked up at him, optics shining with a serene affection he hadn’t seen for an age, it was easy to believe in fate, just a little.

But then again, he had never trusted fate.

 

He lay in the dark for megacycles, unable to recharge. He was sure Orion was already resting, the even cycle of his ventilating fans indicated as much, but then a voice rose from beside him.

“I wish you would tell me what’s wrong,” Orion’s tone was wistful and a touch amused. “I can’t recharge properly with you stewing over there.”

“Perhaps I should tell you a story?” he jested, but Orion clicked with interest.

“Would you? You tell the most compelling stories. Odd, you’d think I’d be better at it, given my profession.”

“Very well. Once, vorns and vorns ago, there lived a mech.”

“A gladiator.”

“I thought I was telling the story.”

“Alright, alright, I’ll hush.”

“A gladiator then. And he loved another mech. Not a mech of high rank, or of unsurpassing loveliness, but strong of spark and true.”

“Oh,” a hand touched against his forearm guard, gentle. “Megatronus, I…”

“I’m not finished. As I said, he loved this mech, and together they dreamed of revolution, of utopia. But their love was not to be, for others twisted the dream, corrupted it, and soon the gladiator and his lover found themselves on opposite sides with weapons in hand.”

Madness, that he should be telling Optimus this, tempting fate. Fate, who had no mercy for either of them. “And they struggled for eons, neither gaining ground, until their world was dead and silent, and the soil of a thousand foreign planets had been sown with the fallen.”

“That’s awful. Megatronus—” Orion tried to break in once again, but he barreled on.

“There’s more. One day, on the battlefield, soaked in energon, the gladiator found his lover, insensible, helpless. That he should kill him was a foregone conclusion, but as he raised his sword, his lover roused and spoke his name in innocence, in puzzlement. And the gladiator realized that his lover was no longer his enemy. That his spark had been wiped clean of horror and memory. So the gladiator took his lover home, in joy, in triumph, and secreted away within the depths of his own spark the filth of war, the pain and anger between them.”

A long silence, and at last Orion spoke, voice tight. “And the ending?”

“There is none.”

“There must be. All stories have an ending.”

“How do you think it ends? That the lover regains his mind and his rage over the betrayal knows no bounds? That he and the gladiator tear each other’s sparks from their bodies?”

More silence.

And Orion spoke once more, soft but full of conviction, “I think, I think…that if it had been me, even with all of that between us, I don’t think I could bring myself to tear out your spark.” He pressed against Megatron’s side, voice no more than a muffled, sorrowful whisper. 

“And…I might have been glad to forget.”

Megatron pulled him close and shuttered his optics against the coming dawn.


End file.
